In Praise of Vladimir Putin: Will He Finish What He Started?

No one who knows anything of Russia’s tragic and tortured history can fail to be moved by the demonstrations that have taken place since the Russian elections. They are large, they are peaceful and they are composed of something that has never really before existed in Russia.

Middle-class members of a civil society, still small but growing—and frankly, quite probably more representative of Russia than the old Soviet dissidents, despite their courage and integrity.

Above all else, this civil society is the product of both Putin and Medvedev’s policies, particularly Putin’s. When Putin became Acting President in 1999, he succeeded Boris Yeltsin, whose tenure was marked by the—unpopular and therefore undemocratic—dissolution of the Soviet Union and the needless destruction of its economy, resulting in the impoverishment of millions of ordinary Soviets, plunging life expectancy, soaring inflation, surging crime and inequality, not to speak of corruption, as well as an ugly and—even worse—inconclusive—war in Chechnya. Putin’s Russia has been marked by improved life expectancy, the transformation of the ruble into a hard currency, reduced poverty, corruption, and crime, and a successful war in Chechnya—a necessary precondition for Russia’s territorial integrity. (Any American who thinks Russia should be dissolved, especially by force, should consider Bleeding Kansas.) Moreover, his administration has marked the slow and halting return of Russian national assets to Russian control. Put plainly, Russia is a significantly less violent and brutish country under Mr. Putin than under Mr. Yeltsin—who shelled the Russian Parliament, or Duma, in October 1993, killing 500 and wounding 1000.

And Russians know that—including those protesting against him. Mr. Putin is genuinely popular in a way that no living American politician is. This makes United Russia’s election fraud unworthy of him—regardless of his degree of responsibility, if any. He is simply better than that: his real accomplishments speak for him, and anyone who attempts to denigrate him by saying they are a result of Russia’s vast mineral wealth, including oil, should consider the fact that Nigeria has oil, too. Which Nigerians openly consider a curse. (As do many Arabs.)

These moving demonstrations—the largest since those of late September 1993, possibly since those of August 1991, when hardliners attempted a coup against Gorbachev, a coup both the Army and the KGB refused to support—are in many ways an outgrowth of Putin’s success. In a strange way, they are an expression of deep trust that a man from an organization that many might reasonable describe as evil will not massacre them. After all, Russians know more of their history—as terribly painful as that knowledge is—than Americans do. They know about Yeltsin’s massacre, as they know about the massacres of Nikita Khrushchev, who began what I suspect he knew would be the multi-generational process of decompressing Russia from generations of horror that culminated in Stalin’s rule. There are many things Americans do not understand, one of which it how long it can take to decompress from horror: the higher the level, the less time it takes. We must be honest that thanks to the alliance between the Tsar and the Orthodox Church, the pre-revolutionary educational and cultural level of Russians, particularly peasants in an overwhelmingly agrarian society, was very low.

Putin’s task now is not so much to become a reformer—I suspect he has not the temperament for it—as to shield those who are—and he more than has the combative temperament to do that. He saved his nation from an abyss that until now, Americans have not looked into since our Civil War. That is a tremendous accomplishment, but human beings do not live by bread alone, we need, in terms of the old women’s rights slogan, roses as well. His work is half done.

This is the task before him. To make it possible for others to sharply reduce environmental damage, economic and political corruption and the brutality sadly endemic to its security services; to help reinvigorate Russian society, from establishing a high-value-added sector (the world does not live by hi-tech alone) to creating a creative and sympathetic, as well as honest and intellectually rigorous educational system. To make Russia a place that people—not just Russians—want to visit, work in, live in; Russian a language people want to learn and a literature that people want to read, music they want to listen to, dance (not just ballet) that they want to see. (Indeed, some of this is already happening in Perm, which has become one of the world’s great cities for modern art.)

If Mr. Putin will do this, he will quite simply be the greatest leader his country has ever had—and one of the best the world has ever seen. And it is not an impossible road for him to travel; Ariel Sharon traveled a similar road. Nor would Mr. Putin be alone: he would have the support of millions of Russians, including much of the civil society that he helped midwife.